QS Intelligence Unit

The Bologna Process is pressing on with its agenda of enhanced student mobility, standardisation of degrees and credit transfer, as well as quality assurance in order to promote institutional competition amongst its 46 participating countries. But as new countries contemplate membership, it is important to evaluate what the last ten years have achieved under this ambitious implementation programme.

The European University Association recently published Trends 2010 which examines a decade of higher education in the context of Bologna and outlines their goal for the future. Here are a few highlights, taken directly from the 100 –page report.

Overview

-      Overall participation rates in higher education have increased by 25% on average between 1998 and 2006 – or as in Poland where enrolment increased by 90% during this period – albeit with significant differences across countries and across disciplines, with science and technology fields losing their attractiveness. (18)
-      A recent study revealed that the number of 10-14 year olds in the EU is expected to fall by 15% between 2000 and 2020, resulting in a drastic reduction of the school-going population (Eurydice 2009), with a potential domino effect on higher education. The professoriate in higher education is greying and the ‘baby boom’ generation is going into retirement. Because these trends are uneven within a country (causing rural brain drain in some) and across Europe, they may lead to an exacerbated ‘brain war’ for students and academic staff, within Europe, at a time when the global competition for talents is heating up and international ranking schemes are proliferating and forcing institutional leaders to rethink their positioning within the global higher education community (19).
-      The concept of academic freedom is changing – some say eroding – because academics are pressured to be successful in seeking funding for their research to match the research strategies and priorities of their institutions (22)

Implementation – Degree Structure –implementation of the three-cycle system which commences with the Bachelor’s

-      A large majority of institutions have implemented the new Bologna degree structure: from 53% of institutions in 2003 to 95% in 2010. In some cases, however, the change has not led to meaningful curricular renewal, but rather to compressed Bachelor degrees that leave little flexibility for students (7).
-      There is also concern in some countries, such as Austria, Germany and Portugal, which have reduced the duration of their Bachelor degrees to three years, that this is making it difficult to include periods of mobility or internships and to achieve student engagement (40).
-      Several site visit reports suggest that institutions, academics and students in some countries are far from convinced of the value of the Bologna first cycle and of its acceptance by employers (40).
-      Assuming no change on this front, the Bachelor is likely to remain relatively disregarded by the labour market until such time as its place in national qualifications frameworks becomes established (43).

Looking beyond 2010

-      Quality Assurance – Identified as the most pressing development that will most affect higher education institutions in 5 years’ time (90)…many quality procedures are in place, often managed at faculty rather than at institutional level. As a result, there is wider ownership of quality processes and the concept of quality culture is reaching down but there is not always a clear feedback loop to the institution’s strategic orientation (87).
-      Internationalisation has been identified by HEIs as the third, most important change driver in the past three years and is expected to move to first place within the next five years (8).
-      For the past three years, the change agenda has shifted to the more complex, less quantifiable issues of cultural change and embedding the structural changes and individual Bologna tools in institutions. At the same time, given the rapid transformation of higher education in many countries, issues of institutional governance, leadership and strategic development have grown in importance. Thus, when institutions are asked which developments will most affect them in five years’ time, only 15% mention the Bologna Process (90).

A late post with news articles for week commencing May 4th:

• The pressure to do well on international league tables has caused a few UK universities to allegedly put pressure on students to fib on the National Student Survey. According to complaints logged with the HEFCE, students at Swansea, Anglia Ruskin, Derby, Leicester, Portsmouth, Sunderland, Kingston, and London Metropolitan were pressured by university lecturers and heads of department to score high marks on their university experience.
  Full Story: Telegraph
  More: The Guardian
        
• Education stocks dropped when a U.S Department of Education official compared for-profit institutions to Wall Street firms who caused the financial meltdown. Deputy Undersecretary of Education Robert Shireman said that not only is training at these institutions questionable and they deplete federal education funding, but oversight in accrediting these for-profits is dubious.
  Full Story: Bloomberg Business Week
       
• Brazil will play an instrumental role in rebuilding Haiti’s devastated Higher Education system. According to a cooperation memorandum between the two countries, academic agreements will be discussed to promote internationalisation and scholarship programmes will be introduced for Haitians who plan on post-graduate study.
  Full Story: iStockAnalyst
     
• The African Development Fund has approved a 20 million dollar project to support the Higher Education system in Eritrea. Chief Education Specialist Abdi Younis says that the funds will look into recruiting better staff, repairing infrastructure, and developing research capability at Eritrea’s seven higher education institutions.
  Full Story: All Africa
              
• Malaysia and Yemen are entering talks to form important educational agreements. Proposals will allow Yemeni students to study in Malaysian universities at reduced costs. In addition, the proposed bilateral agreements would include reviewing the quality of programmes at Yemeni universities.
  Full Story: Bernama

Over the past two days I have had the pleasure of attending the 49th Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research in Atlanta. Normally at many of the conferences we attend there is a filtering process to find the right people to talk to, and then we still attract a fairly diverse audience from all levels of a university – the presentations we deliver have to meet these diverse needs. They frequently go well but are far less focused than this.

The very idea that there is a dedicated office in a university collecting, compiling, submitting and analyzing data on themselves, educating the strategy of the institution seems to be a predominately US inspired idea – it happens inrelatively isolated cases elsewhere – but that it has been running an annual conference for 49 years implies extraordinary foresight. Our experience has been of many institutions establishing these offices in response to the requirement to collect and submit data rather than for proprietary business intelligence needs.

The existence of this kind of an office within an institution provides a highly effective, expert conduit for our communication with universities, as has been the case with universities in many countries, but the practice taking broad enough hold to justify a national, regional or even global organisation and conference to support them provides the institutions with a great deal more leverage over third-party evaluating organisations such as ours. Indeed, Robert Morse, of the US News who kindly introduced us to this group has been coming to this event for 10 years – using it as a forum to collect qualified feedback and present and discuss proposed methodological changes. It will be an annual appointment on our calendar from this point forward.

If you work in an office of this nature, in a country where access to such a forum is not yet present, I would strongly recommend you investigate its foundation. Or join an international group.

Check out the US version on www.airweb.org or their international affiliates here www.airweb.org/page.asp?page=577

I imagine this is too simple an idea to be particularly practical but would welcome feedback either way.

The THE-QS World University Rankings, amongst others, are frequently criticized in all sorts of ways, some fair and some not.

One of the most common observations is the failure of most aggregate ranking systems, whether international or domestic, to acknowledge the different missions and typologies of institutions.

In the case of the THE-QS exercise, large institutions are likely to be advantaged in terms or recognition whilst smaller ones may have greater ability to perform in some of the ratio based indicators.

In the US we frequently refer to the Carnegie classification system to better understand the nature of institutions that are featured in the rankings. What if we were to apply a similar, albeit simpler, concept to universities at a world level and include a classification alongside all ranking results.

Classifications might include:

Type A: Large, fully comprehensive

More than 10,000 students. Offer programs in all 5 of our broad faculty areas. Has a medical school.

(i) High Research - Over 5,000 papers in 5 year Scopus extract.
(ii) Moderate Research - 1,000-4,999 papers in 5 yyear Scopus extract
(iii) Low Research - 100-999 papers in 5 year Scopus extract
(iv) Negligible Research - Less than 100 papers in 5 year Scopus extract

Type B: Large, comprehensive

More than 10,000 students, operates programs in ALL of our 5 broad faculty areas. Has no medical school.

(i-iv) Reduced thresholds

Type C: Large, focused

More than 10,000 students. Operates programs in 3 or 4 of our broad faculty areas.

(i-iv) Reduced Thresholds

Type D: Large, specialist

More than 10,000 students. Operates programs in 1 or 2 of our broad faculty areas

(i-iv) Research thresholds set against mean or median for stated specialist faculty areas

Types E-H: same as above but for medium sized institutions. 4,000-10,000 students

Types H-K: Same as above but for small institutions – less than 4,000 students

A (u) or (p) could be added to denote institutions that only offer programs at either undergraduate or postgraduate level.

This is unlikely to, yet, be exhaustive but a system such as this may help readers put the ranking results in context. Thoughts and suggestions welcome.

The Reader’s Digest Trusted Brand Awards, which include a category for universities, have been announced for Singapore and Taiwan with a number of additional countries to follow. NUS and NTU feature for Singapore with National Taiwan University featured in Taiwan. Gold and Platinum levels are awarded. www.rdasiatrustedbrands.com

Part of the excitement of university and business school rankings is that there is no “ultimate solution”. At a symposium at Griffith University in 2007, Nian Cai Liu – who leads Shanghai Jiao Tong’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (www.arwu.org) was posed the question, “Many rankings use surveys as a component of their methodology, why do you choose not to?”. His matter of fact response was “I’m an Engineer”.

But his team’s selection of Nobel Prizes or Highly Cited Authors as indicators are not intrinsically less questionable as measures of university quality in the round – which regardless of stated purpose, the results are often being used for. Three days ago at a comparable event in Madrid, organised by Isidro Aguillo and his Cybermetrics team, similar aspersions were cast on surveys in contrast with more “statistically robust” measures such as link analysis – as used for the Webometrics exercise (www.webometrics.info). The supposition was made that simply because the THE-QS exercise is the most “geographically generous” of the four global aggregate rankings, it must be some how wrong. And that maybe survey bias is to blame for that.

Well I have news for you. THEY ARE ALL WRONG. 

The higher profile of universities in China and Hong Kong in THE-QS was cited as evidence for survey bias – whilst it is well-documented on our website that the survey response from China, in particular, is disproportinately low. We are working to remedy this, but it is clearly unlikely to strongly favour Chinese institutions – these universities are perfoming well due to the profile they are building outside China.

Despite the fact that these surveys are currently only conducted in English and Spanish, the survey compenents offer a much reduced language bias than seems to be implied from Nobel Prizes, citations (in any index), cybermetrics, publications in Nature & Science, highly cited authors and many other factors selected by other international evaluations. Respondents, even those responding in English, are cogniscent of the performance of other institutions in their own language – and this seems to be coming through in the results.

Sure, there are biases in the surveys, and the system overall – some are partially corrected for and some are not, but these exist in every other system too even if they may not be quite as immediately evident.

The THE-QS work is presented prolifically around the world – by myself, my colleagues, the THE and third-parties. We present it alongside the other exercises and are always careful to acknowledge that each has its value and each, including our own, has its pitfalls. NONE should be taken too seriously, and to date ALL bear some interest if viewed objectively.

The most entertaining input I have received since conducting this work came from an academic that systematically discredited all of the indicators we have been using but then concluded that, overall, he “liked what we were doing”. It is possible to do that with any of the systems out there – domestic, regional or global. The most savvy universities are using the rankings phenomenon to catalyze and establish keener performance evaluation internally at a faculty, department and individual staff member level. Driving it down to this level can help build actionable metrics as opposed to abstract statisitics and this can lead to a university being able to revolutionise their performance in education and research, and in time, as a side-effect rather than an objective, improve their performance in rankings.